Commenting mainly on France and U.S.policy in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Author of "Web of Deceit, the History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush." Now finishing a novel, "The Watchman's File," delving into Israel's most closely-guarded secret. [It's not the bomb.]

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Saturday, February 25, 2012

Thousands of largely unarmed people rise up against a brutal
regime. In reaction, military commanders are dispatched to ruthlessly crush the
revolt. Men, women, and children are cut down in cold blood, houses and
apartments destroyed, the streets littered with body parts and piles of the
dead. Desperate appeals are made to the world for help, for arms, for medicines, for
rescue.

The leaders of the world wring their hands and meet to deal
with the horrific situation.
Regrettably, there are too many reasons not to act; too many
complications, too many subtleties. Sophisticated diplomats and heads of state
understand these things. The slaughter continues.

One such meeting just ended in Tunis on February 24th,
called to deal with the uprising in Syria. The other was held in Bermuda, April 1943, with delegations from the
U.S. and Great Britain to discuss the terrible predicament of the millions of
Jews trapped in Hitler’s Europe.

Two days into the Bermuda conference, the delegates received
word of a transmission from an underground Polish radio operating out of
Warsaw. Its desperate message:"The
last 35,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto are condemned to death. Warsaw is once
again deafened with the bursts of gunfire. People are being murdered. Women and
children are defending themselves with their bare hands. Save us..." At
that point the radio went dead.

Of course, the differences between the Holocaust and the
Warsaw Ghetto and the current bloody uprising in Syria are huge. But the harrowing stories that have come
down to us from the Warsaw Ghetto are eerily similar to the horrific accounts
emanating from Homs and other Syrian towns over the past few months.

And, in both cases, the leaders of the world were challenged
to react.

The Jews who rose up in Warsaw were the remnants of more
than 250,000 Jews originally herded into the Ghetto. They finally refused to
follow Nazi diktats when they came to realize that they were being deported not
to labor camps but to the death camp at Treblinka.

Against German tanks, artillery, and poison gas, the Jews
had only a few revolvers, rifles, and Molotov cocktails, some of them smuggled
into the Ghetto by sympathetic members of the Polish Underground. Via underground radio and smuggled written
messages, they attempted to alert the world with desperate appeals for arms,
for food, medicines, for support of any kind.

Meanwhile, by coincidence, reluctant American
and British delegations –who for months had been under mounting pressure
from domestic Jewish organizations--were meeting in Bermuda to deal with the
question of what, if anything, they would do to save Europe’s Jews from Hitler,
including large numbers of Jews in areas not yet occupied by the Nazis.

In Bermuda the British and American delegates talked on and
on for twelve days. Jewish groups were not allowed to attend—nor were the
media. At the end, the delegates issued a few hand-wringing statements, but did
nothing.

In fact, one of their fears was that Hitler might actually
open the gates of occupied Europe and allow the Jews to flee. The last thing
the Americans and British governments wanted to deal with was a flood of
immigrant Jews. Britain was also particularly unwilling to allow Jews to go to
Palestine, then under British rule, for fear of offending the Arabs.

The basic reason for British and American inaction was deep-seated
anti-Semitism in both England and the United States, particularly pronounced in
the British Government and the U.S. State Department—but also in the general
population. Not even Franklin
Roosevelt was willing to make saving the Jews of Europe a major issue until
1944.

Back in Warsaw, after three weeks of desperate struggle, on
May 16, 1943 the last resistance in the Ghetto was annihilated.

In solidarity with his fellow Jews, an exile leader living in
England, Samuel Zygelboim committed suicide. For months, he had pleaded with
the Allies to retaliate against Hitler for the on-going slaughter of Polish
Jews.

In a BBC broadcast on December 1942, he had warned, "if
Polish Jewry's call for help goes unheeded, Hitler will have achieved one of
his war aims-to destroy the Jews of Europe irrespective of the military outcome
of the war."

[Have to admit, that warning sounds like those decrying the
failure of the U.N. to take a tougher stand against Assad for the bloodbath in
Syria. ]

After the Warsaw Ghetto fell, Samuel
Zygelboim left behind a suicide note charging the Germans with the murder
of Polish Jews, but he also accused the Allied governments, including the
Polish Government-in-Exile, of not having done enough to rescue the Jews from
the murderous hands of the Germans. Then he wrote:

By my death I wish to make my final
protest against the passivity with which the world has witnessed and permitted
the annihilation of the Jewish people.”

One would like to imagine that, the outcome of the Bermuda
Conference would have been dramatically different if the Internet had been
around at the time. If instead of a lonely plea from an underground radio
station, or the dry accounts of a few diplomatic cables, there had been You Tube
and Twitter and Facebook, broadcasting to the world the horrors of the Warsaw
Ghetto and the Holocaust.

Imagine for instance, if anyone with the Internet had been
able to follow minute-by –bloody minute the massacre of the civilians in the
Warsaw Ghetto: the slaughter of men, women and children, the makeshift
hospitals, their floors running red with blood. Imagine if the world had seen
all that 69 years ago: the scenes we’ve been witnessing every day from Homs.

Of course, the world would have reacted. How could they have
not?

Just look at our diplomats discussing Syria in Tunis this
past Friday.

Monday, February 6, 2012

In the brief interview he gave ABC before the
Superbowl, President Obama declared “I’ve been very clear that we’re going to
do everything we can to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and
creating an arms race, a nuclear arms race, in a volatile region.”

Sounds like a very laudable goal, right. Except
for the fact that, as I recently blogged, the nuclear arms race
in the Middle East is already under way. It began almost fifty years ago when
Israel developed the bomb.

According to a 2007
study by the Federation of American Scientists, “Estimates
for Israel's nuclear weapons stockpile range from 70 to 400 warheads. The
actual number is probably closer to the lower estimate. Additional weapons
could probably be built from inventories of fissile materials.”

In other words, as I wrote, “One of the most
uncommented on ironies today is that Israel is threatening military action to
prevent Iran from continuing the same clandestine route to nuclear weapons that
Israel took; just as Israeli planes destroyed nuclear reactors in Syria and
Iraq to prevent those countries from following Israel’s lead”

Indeed, Israel, probably has more nukes today
than either India or Pakistan. Speculation is that they could be fired from
long-range artillery, dropped as bombs, or delivered as warheads from Israeli
submarines or via Israel’s Jehrico 1 and 2 Missiles. There has also
been conjecture about nuclear land mines, suitcase bombs, and missiles fired
from Israelis submarines.

A parallel irony, as I pointed out, is the fact
that, for the past fifty years, every American President has refused to
publicly recognize the fact of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

On Superbowl Sunday President Obama kept the
tradition intact.

Of course, so did ABC News and reporter Matt
Lauer who let Obama’s statement go unchallenged. But, hey, that’s what the
mainstream media has done for years.

Whatever your views on this crisis, how are we
supposed to discuss it--never mind resolve it--with such a political blind
spot.

Check it out the missing issue yourself as you
follow the breathless coverage of the current crisis.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

One of the most uncommented on ironies
today is that Israel is threatening military action to prevent Iran from continuing
the same clandestine route to nuclear weapons that Israel took; just as Israeli
planes destroyed nuclear reactors in Syria and Iraq to prevent those countries
from following Israel’s lead.

A parallel irony: President Obama champions
an economic embargo to force Iran to back off its nuclear program. Yet, for
more than half a century one American president after another declined to sound
any alarums over Israel’s secret drive for nukes. Indeed, U.S. leaders refused to
even officially acknowledge the foreboding intelligence about Israel’s
intentions that American analysts were providing. That flimflam continues to
this day.

[Perhaps the most incisive chronicle of
this official deception is “The Samson Option,” written in 1991 by
investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Most of the following is drawn from that
book.]

The charade began in the early 1950’s
during the Eisenhower administration. Worried about Israel’s survival in the
face of massive Arab opposition, and unable to get assurances from Eisenhower
that the new Zionist state would be protected by America’s nuclear
umbrella, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion set out clandestinely to provide
Israel with its own nuclear weapons.

The secret facility would
be constructed at Dimona in the Negev desert. The mammoth project would be off
the books, paid for by wealthy Jews from around the world. France would also play
a key but secret role, engineering a sophisticated reprocessing plant deep
under the reactor at Dimona.

The Israeli leader who oversaw the clandestine program was Shimon Peres. These days, as President
of Israel, Peres talks darkly of Iran’s nuclear deception. For decades however,
he repeatedly lied to American officials about Israel’s nuclear intentions,
claiming that Israel was working on a small reactor for peaceful purposes.

It was impossible however to hide the massive new
construction from America’s high-flying U2 spy plane. In late 1958 or early
1959, CIA photo intelligence experts, spotted what looked almost certainly to be
a nuclear reactor being built at Dimona. They rushed the raw images to the White
House, expecting urgent demands from the Oval Office for more information. This
was, after all, a development that could initiate a disastrous nuclear arms
race in the Middle East.

But there was absolutely no follow-up from the White House. As
one of the analysts later told Seymour Hersh “Nobody came back to me, ever, on
Israel.” Though the analysts continued regular reporting on Dimona, there were
no requests for high-level briefings. “ ‘Thank you,’ and ‘this isn’t going to
be disseminated is it?’ It was that attitude.”

“By the end of 1959,” writes Hersh, “the two analysts had no
doubts that Israel was going for the bomb. They also had no doubts that
President Eisenhower and his advisers were determined to look the other way.”

The reason was evident: Eisenhower publicly was a strong
advocate of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). If he was formally to “know”
of Israel’s nuclear program, he would be obliged to react--against Israel. Which,
in the U.S. could mean serious political consequences.

It was only in December 1960, that the Eisenhower administration,
nearing its end, leaked word about Dimona and France’s involvement to the New York Times. The administration hoped
that, without having to make any official accusations itself, it could oblige
the Israeli government to sign the NPT.

But Ben Gurion flatly denied the Times report. He assured American officials –as well as the Israeli
Knesset--that the Dimona reactor was completely benign. French officials guaranteed
that any plutonium produced at Dimona would be returned to France for
safekeeping (another lie).

The Eisenhower administration, however, had no stomach to take
on Israel and its American lobby. Despite the reports of CIA analysts, Ben
Gurion’s denials went unchallenged. That hypocrisy would remain official America’s policy--even
as U.S. presidents decried the attempts of countries like India, North Korea,
Pakistan, Libya and Iraq to themselves develop the bomb.

Even John Kennedy, who also felt strongly about nuclear
proliferation, was forced for domestic political reasons to back off his demand
for full-scale nspections of Dimona by the U.N.’s IAEA. Instead he agreed to a charade:
inspections would be carried out only by Americans, who would be required to
announce their visits well ahead of time, with the full agreement of Israel. No
spot checks were allowed. The inspectors also were never shown some of the key intelligence
that CIA analysts had gathered on Dimona.

In April 1963, when Kennedy asked Shimon Peres point blank
about Israel’s nuclear intentions, Peres replied with the prevarication that remains
to this day: “I can tell you forthrightly that we will not introduce atomic weapons
in to the region. We certainly won’t be the first to do so. We have no interest
in that. On the contrary, our interest is in de-escalating the armament
tension, even in total disarmament.”

Five years later, however, in 1968, Dimona began producing four
or five warheads a year. But when Lyndon Johnson received a CIA report of that
fact, he ordered CIA director Richard Helms to bury the estimate. No one else
was to be informed, not even Secretary of State Dean Rusk nor Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara.

Later, though Israel was still refusing to sign the
non-proliferation treaty, Johnson agreed to supply that country with high-performance
F-4 Fighters capable of carrying a nuclear weapon on a one-way mission to
Moscow.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger came to power in 1969, with
an even more sympathetic attitude towards Israel. Its nuclear ambitions, they
felt, were fully justified. They had only contempt for the NPT. As Kissinger’s
deputy Morton Halperin later told Hersh, “Henry believed that it was good to
spread nuclear weapons around the world… He felt it inevitable that most major
powers would get nukes and better for the United States to be on the inside
helping them, than on the outside futilely fighting the process.”

In fact, Israel’s real nuclear intentions were hair-raising:
They would target their nukes not on Egypt or Syria, but the Soviet Union. And
they would make sure that Moscow understood that. The calculation was that
Egypt and Syria, would never dare launch a war against Israel without the
support of the Soviets, at the time their principal ally and arms provider. But
if the men in the Kremlin realized they might face nuclear immolation
themselves, they would never permit their Arab clients to drive Israel into the
sea.

Indeed, that calculation may have worked in 1973. According
to Hersh, after Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack overwhelming
Israel’s defenses, an alarmed Gold Meir gave the order to prepare the nukes for
imminent use. Alerted to Israel’s action, the Soviets immediately cautioned the
Egyptian’s to back off. At the same time, Nixon and Kissinger —informed by the
Israelis themselves of the nuclear deployment ---agreed to a massive emergency
airlift to replace Israel’s depleted arms and ammunition.

But even after those near- catclysmic events, Kissinger kept
the lid on the entire matter. And when Egyptian President Sadat claimed that
Israel had developed nuclear weapons, Shimon Peres again categorically denied
the charges. He accused Sadat of “gathering information of his own making”

And so it went with the administration of Jimmy Carter. On September 21, 1979, when an American spy
satellite picked up a brilliant double flash over the South Indian Ocean, some American
analysts concluded that it was the product of a nuclear explosion-a test conducted
jointly by Israel and South Africa’s apartheid regime.

Once again, the discovery presented the White House with a
terrible dilemma, President Carter
was also brandishing the banner of non proliferation. If he were obliged to
formally recognize Israel’s nuclear status, and didn’t seek tough sanctions
against the Jewish state, he would be roundly criticized as a hypocrite. But, as
always, punishing Israel could also mean serious domestic political trouble.

Once again, the administration shielded the Oval Office from
the truth. Wrote Hersh, “it was important that an American president not know
what there was to know.”

But then, in 1986 the London
Sunday Times published an extraordinary account of Dimona. It was based on
extensive interviews and pictures furnished by Mordecai Vanunu, a thirty-one
year old Moroccan Jew who had been working inside Dimona. He claimed that
Israel’s nuclear stockpile totaled more than two hundred warheads.

[Even before the report was published, Israeli’s leaders
discovered Vanunu’s apostasy. He was enticed by a female Mossad agent to fly to
Rome for a few days; then was drugged, kidnapped and returned to Israel to
stand trial. He was ultimately sentence to eighteen years in a maximum security
prison, spending eleven of those years in solitary confinement. Even today, in
Israel he is still being harassed, forbidden from speaking with any foreigners,
reporters, or attempting to leave the country.]

American intelligence experts were floored by the Times account and the evident sophistication
of Israel’s clandestine program. Officially, however Washington still went
along with the fiction that Israel was not a nuclear state.

Yet again in 1991, Israel made use of its stockpile,
deploying missile launchers armed with nuclear weapons facing Iraq: a terrible
warning of retaliation to Saddam Hussein if he were to fill the Scud missiles
he was firing at Israel with chemical weapons. He never did.

‘Which makes our case!’ defenders of Israel’s nuclear
program will exclaim. Faced with the implacable Arab hostility, Israel was
obliged to get the bomb. And thank God they did.

The problem is that other embattled regimes, make the same
argument. Since the days of the Shah, for instance, Iran’s leaders, feeling threatened
first by the Soviet Union, then after 1979, by the United States, have pushed
for nuclear weapons. And not without reason. To this day, the American president—not
to mention rabid Republican primary candidates—openly discuss the option of attacking
Iran.

But wait, we are assured, Israel is different—an ally, not
governed by crazies like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who have sworn to wipe Israel from
the map.

Not to defend the tyrants running Iran, but many
experts convincingly dispute that Ahmadinejad actually threatened nuclear
annihilation of Israel. In
addition, the Zionist state has had its own share of crazies who have long
advocated using force to create a “Greater Israel.” Ariel Sharon, for instance,
who precipitated a bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982 in a futile attempt to wipe
out the PLO. He also openly talked about overthrowing King Hussein to turn
Jordan by force into a Palestinian State.

Officially, however, Washington and Israel continue the
ridiculous pretence that Israel has no nuclear weapons. To this day, Israel
reporters can only write about their country’s nuclear capacity if they cite
foreign publications as the source. And in the U.S., Washington’s official
silence seems curiously contagious: how often, in the current flurry of media
reports about the threat from Iran is there any mention of Israel’s own nuclear
arsenal?

The bottom line is this—whatever your view about Iran or
Israel’s right to nuclear weapons--how can statesmen or reporters or anyone seriously
discuss the current crisis over Iran when a key part of the dispute is
officially hidden from view? How can the U.S. and Israel deal with proposals
for a nuclear free Middle East when they still refuse officially to acknowledge
that the region is not nuclear free—and hasn’t been for the past fifty years?

@barrylando

About Me

Originally from Vancouver, studied at Harvard, Harvard Law and Columbia University, then correspondent for Time Life in South America, and 30 years as Producer with 60 Minutes in Washington D.C. and Paris, where I now live. Wrote book on history of Western Invervention in Iraq, Web of Deceit, now writing a novel, painting, travelling, visiting friends and relatives.